Imogen and I were to go to a party that evening. Sitting in her room preparing ourselves, we discussed who might be there. I still nurtured a secret desire to meet and spellbind Tom the racehorse rider. I had seen him several times, but had never dared speak to him, terrified that my infatuation might be visible and mocked.
‘Amelia will be there, won’t she?’ I strained with the effort to sound casual. ‘She seems to spend a lot of time with her cousin Tom, doesn’t she?’
Imogen was painting her tiny mouth pale pink with a delicate brush and a pot of gluey lip gloss. ‘She’s very keen on him,’ she mumbled. ‘And she knows it makes her more popular to be with him, because all the girls have crushes on Tom.’ Absorbed, she didn’t see the prickly flush spread across my face. We went downstairs to find Edward, who was driving us.
The party was in a small flint barn sunk deep into a fold of curving pasture, two miles from the nearest road. A paint-spattered sheet draped over the door was the only attempt at decoration; the rest of the barn was bare. A friend of Edward’s sat on the floor, a screwdriver and a tape recorder in his hands. ‘The music has packed up,’ he said gloomily as we entered.
Imogen and I stood by the door and looked across the hazy summer fields. An occasional car lumbered towards us, depositing brightly clad partygoers who tripped giggling into the barn, and then stood like a disconsolate herd of cows in the corner by the barrel of beer. Intermittent squawks and groans issued from the tape machine; the only other sounds were nocturnal twitterings from sleepy birds and the neurotic, ceaseless whisper of wind in the trees. Tom and Amelia arrived in a tiny, grunting mini-moke. This confirmed my high opinion of Tom. Very few others found the barn. At midnight, bored and sober, Edward decided to leave. Tom and Amelia followed us. We skidded over shorn hayfields back on to the road. I sat in the front with Edward, my feet up on the glove compartment of the car, and leaned back looking out of the sun-roof at pale stars in the deep purple sky.
‘Tom is really messing around,’ said Edward, as the mini-moke zoomed past us on a bend. I sat up as we rounded the corner. There, squat and stationary, music blaring and lights flashing, was the mini-moke.
‘We’re going to crash,’ said Edward, trying to swerve, but we were going too fast and I watched with curious detachment as we smashed into the mini-moke. My head hit the windscreen and cold glass splintered in my hair and on my face. My shins were thrust into the dashboard as the car spiralled into the roadside.
‘Get out! For Christ’s sake get out!’ yelled Edward. ‘There’s another car coming.’ Imogen scrambled out from the back and I tried to open my door. It was buckled and stuck. I did not dare to move, or even look round. Blood oozed warm on my face; if I moved, I knew the slow sticky bleeding would burst into a torrent. Motionless in heaped dead metal, I watched through the hole my head had made in the windscreen as the others ran and stopped in shocked, uncertain circles.
Edward and Tom pushed the cars off the road and pressed themselves back on the bank. A sweep of headlights came towards us. Imogen was still trying to let me out. ‘Are you all right? Oh, God, she’s got blood on her face. Edward, come here quick!’ Edward came just as the door yielded. He sank back on the verge. ‘Oh God, what have I done?’ he whispered. And finally I cried, terror at his expression pumping tears until I heaved with breathless, hysterical sobs.
Daddy came to collect me from Imogen’s house the next morning. He looked very angry until we got into the car. Then he said, ‘Darling heart, thank God you’re not hurt. That tiny cut on your face will be gone in a week.’ I wept, and he took my hand. ‘Look at me.’ I did. He was smiling. ‘My love, it will not spoil your beauty, so don’t cry.’
Two weeks later my face was healed, and after a series of lengthy, tiring telephone calls and visits, I finally persuaded Edward that it was not his fault. Secretly I enjoyed my role as most damaged victim of a car crash. I stayed at home, craving comfort and receiving it in cups of hot chocolate and rolls of loo paper to cry into. Mummy was furious, feeding my sense of martyrdom by shouting in bouts lasting a few minutes every day. ‘How can you be so idiotic as to let yourself be driven by drunken louts?’
I said nothing, bowing my head, bearing my undeserved haranguing. Maimed and misjudged, I thought to myself.
Daddy intervened. ‘Eleanor, I think she’s learned her lesson. Let’s hear no more of it.’ Mummy fumed and humphed for a while longer, but eventually gave up, distracted by Poppy, who, aged eight, had decided to become a vegetarian.